Refocusing our perspective: the quest for human dignity
Galatians 6:7, “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
For hundreds of millions of workers across the developing world, staving off economic catastrophe is a daily battle. The line between making ends just about meet and starving is a thin one. The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns in developing countries has made this battle both immeasurably harder and with no end in sight. The speed and the scope of the pandemic has affected all areas of economic activity ranging from tourism in Thailand to textile manufacturing in Vietnam to falls in remittances from Filipinos living abroad to family members back home.
The economic indicators detailing the financial repercussions, even taking the most optimistic projections, are unprecedented. On 15th April, the IMF warned “Growth in Asia is expected to stall at 0% in 2020. This is the worst growth performance in almost 60 years, including during the Global Financial Crisis (4.7%) and the Asian Financial Crisis (1.3%).”
Good economics relies on good data. Economists pride themselves on supporting their arguments, verifying their models and promoting their theories on the basis of sound data and analytical techniques. However, for most of us, there comes a certain point when these numbers, statistics and measurements start to lose meaning and context. Understanding the scale of these numbers — whether it be conceptualizing $100bn of capital outflows from emerging markets since the onset of Covid-19, the International Labour Organisation’s assessment that 2 billion casual labourers across the developing world are most at risk or Oxfam’s recent call for the cancellation of $1 trillion of debt owed by developing countries — becomes an increasingly challenging exercise.
But what is often overlooked is that behind all of these statistics are hundreds of millions of individual human stories; individual stories laced with fear, anxiety, perhaps anger, helplessness and uncertainty. Sometimes we need to shift our perspective away from the economic data and remember the daily struggle of millions of other humans. I say humans because statistics have a certain cold manner of dehumanising very real stories of hardship and grief. Humans are emotional and interactive beings and we, as a species, are able to relate to other humans via these stories rather than through cold distant data. If we shift our perspective, and recontextualize our outlook, we are faced with a very stark reality: the sheer indignity that millions of our fellow humans live. This is nothing new; but Covid-19 has shone an unwelcome light on this unnerving reality. The purpose of this article is not to discuss why this may be the case. It is not to argue how a cocktail of institutional economic mismanagement, infrastructural fragilities (in many instances a stark reminder of many countries’ colonial past) corruption and misallocation of resources has, over decades, provided a breeding ground for endemic poverty to take hold. All of these issues will, in time, be explored but this article is not the time for that. Rather, the purpose of the article is to cast a reminder that behind every set of statistics, every projection, and every measurement, there are hundreds of millions of untold stories of tragedy, despair and indignity.
The world as we know it has changed. There is no normal on the other side. It’s just what is left and what we rebuild. The 2019 Nobel Prize winning economist A.Banerjee recently tweeted “I don’t think people understand that there is no normal to return to.” If there is one silver lining to this pandemic, it is that we as humanity take a step back and consider how we can build a better world, the majority of whose inhabitants live in squalor on less than $5 per day. In the early 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould posited a mental model called Punctuated Equilibrium. Gould argues that evolution did not happen in a gradual linear way; rather things stayed the same for a while and then there was an explosion of events that he called Punctuated Equilibrium. We only need to cast an eye on revolutions throughout history to realise the unpredictability and speed with which events can take. Let us therefore take on this mantle of responsibility. Let us ensure that the pandemic will herald the beginning, a reset, of how we acknowledge and embrace the fundamental human desire for human dignity so that it can take centre stage in how we approach our economic priorities as a society. If a pandemic does not initiate this reset, then nothing will.
Our mission at ARCC is to financially empower millions of people across urban communities in Southeast Asia who are currently excluded from the incumbent financial ecosystem. We believe in the resilience and entrepreneurial nous of those who, largely down to fate of where they were born, have not been given a fair chance. We should not take for granted the relative social stability of developing economies in recent decades for unending social stability. Everything has a breaking point and it is up to us to ensure we never arrive at Gould’s ominous “explosion point.” Quite simply, working towards improving the human dignity of millions of people is the only justification that is needed.
In the words of the Enlightenment philosopher Kant, “Do the right thing because it is right.”
At ARCC we intend to do just that.
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16 April 2020
Research of IBMR.io & ARCC
Editors: Eric Tao, Head of Media IBMR.io & Sinjin Jung, Managing Director IBMR.io.
